The Last Ember Read online

  31

  Emili looked out the window, dazed.

  “That’s why Salah ad-Din is digging here,” she said. “Because there is information in Rome that he cannot find beneath the Mount. Jon, you have no idea how”—she searched for the English word—“vast all this is.”

  “Vast?” Chandler asked eagerly.

  “When Sharif and I were in Jerusalem, his informants told us that Salah ad-Din was searching for a relic. It would make perfect sense that it’s the menorah. If war prisoners from Jerusalem hid the menorah, and left messages in Rome about its location, Salah ad-Din’s team would have to dig here first to learn where it was.”

  “Emili, have you any idea the kind of operation it would have taken to have accomplished what Chandler is suggesting? Eight feet of solid gold smuggled out of the Temple Mount on the eve of Jerusalem’s destruction? None of the names we saw beneath the Colosseum had the kind of access it would have taken to smuggle the menorah out from under Titus’s siege. Berenice infiltrated the court too late, seducing Titus after the destruction. Clemens, Aliterius, and Epaphroditus never left Rome during the conflict. None of them knew the exact moment of Titus’s invasion of the Temple’s Holy of Holies.”

  “Except Josephus,” Emili rebutted. “You said yourself he was inside General Titus’s tent. He could have used Roman military information to learn perimeter weaknesses in their siege, all to smuggle out the one treasure sought by countless empires before Rome. It makes perfect sense of your theory, Jon. After the war, Josephus developed a network to hide the menorah in Jerusalem, and with that line beneath the Colosseum may have been trying to tell someone where.”

  “There must be another message in the Domus Aurea,” Chandler said, his eyes returning to the inscription in the digital camera’s view finder. “The inscription beneath the Colosseum singled out Nero’s buried palace for a reason. We can get maps of that ruin from the academy library.”

  “The academy library?” Jonathan threw his hands up. “Okay, that about does it for me. This isn’t graduate school!” He grabbed his dust-covered suit jacket from the chair.

  “Seven years ago, you spent day and night researching Josephus to find out why he would have forsaken his reputation for all of time,” Emili said. “Down there in the Colosseum, we may have finally found the answer, and you are going to walk away?”

  Jonathan put his coat under his arm. “In case you’ve forgotten, I already ruined one career seven years ago. I don’t intend to do it again.” His BlackBerry rattled, and he looked down. It was a message from Mildren, marked “Urgent.”

  Thirty minutes. Meeting in Tatton’s office.

  “What is it?” Emili said.

  “The firm. A meeting.”

  “A meeting?” Chandler looked at Jonathan incredulously. “We’re talking about the most precious war treasure of the Roman world, and you’re talking about a meeting?”

  “I am not going to jeopardize my entire career at the firm on the basis of some hunch. They may need me at the meeting,” Jonathan said, heading toward the library’s door. He looked at his watch. “It’s eleven-thirty a.m. I have been in Rome for less than twelve hours. I spent this morning in court as a lawyer and, in the hour since then, have narrowly escaped an explosion in the Colosseum and had to duck down side alleys to avoid the police. That’s quite enough for one day.” He turned to Emili. “Go to the carabinieri. They can help you sort this out.”

  “Like they helped you seven years ago?” Emili shot back. “They blamed you for Gianpaolo’s accident the minute they got you in that office. And you shouldered the blame without a single protest.”

  Her directness stunned Jonathan. He remembered sitting in a small interrogation room inside the embassy’s compound on the Via Veneto hours after the catacomb collapsed. A nameless, plainclothed American officer and an equally mysterious Italian counterpart drilled him with questions, their polite tone alternating with fits of rage alleging the accident had been his fault. He remembered feeling removed from his body, a spectator to his own silence. At dawn, the men escorted him to the academy, where his room was already packed up, his luggage waiting for him by the front gate. If only Emili knew why he accepted the academy’s terms forbidding him to speak with her before leaving. It was to protect her from being banished, just as he was.

  “Okay, easy now,” Chandler said, sensing the depth of the accusation. He stepped between them. “The ol’ barrister just needs some time to think about this—”

  “What I need is some kind of evidence,” Jonathan said, running a hand through his hair. “I mean, for God’s sake, I’m a lawyer now.”

  “That’s your own fault,” Emili said.

  Jonathan turned toward the door.

  Emili stood on the other side of the room, not looking at him. The seven years had crept between them again, and Jonathan felt the permanence of what he was leaving behind.

  “I won’t go to the carabinieri,” Jonathan said, “but I just can’t be a part of this. Not anymore.”

  “C’mon, Jon,” Chandler said. “You can’t possibly turn back. This is your Rubicon, man.”

  The Rubicon. It was vintage Chandler. For any student of classics, the Rubicon was more than a river that served as a border for the ancient Roman Empire. Along its banks, in 44 B.C., Julius Caesar gathered his troops, and as in any heroic legend, faced his inner torment about whether to submit to the law or defy it. Chandler’s right, Jonathan thought. Not going to the meeting meant forging across his own Rubicon into a territory beyond his self-interest. He had only to throw his coat back on the armrest of the chair and help her. It was the heroic thing to do.

  “You’re right, Chandler. This is my Rubicon,” Jonathan said, imagining himself, like Caesar, a general atop his horse with thousands of infantrymen waiting for him to sound the charge. But Jonathan knew there would be no charge. He pictured himself pulling his horse back from the water’s edge and, to the disappointment of countless troops, retreating without a word.

  “Good luck to both of you,” he said, and closed the door behind him.

  32

  At the Hotel Exedra, Jonathan changed into the only other suit he had brought to Rome: a gray worsted-wool suit that he kept as a spare in his office closet in New York and that he luckily grabbed before his flight. He did not have time to shower, but the suit, his combed hair, and two overlapping Band-Aids on his left hand restored his physical appearance. He dabbed on some cheap aftershave he had gotten from a street kiosk along Via Pasquino, around the corner from the firm.

  Returning to the calm of Dulling and Pierce’s palazzo had a hallucinatory quality, the aging secretaries at their baroque desks, the Italian businessmen smoking outside negotiating rooms along the palazzo’s second floor. One attorney directed two aristocratic-looking Italian women in large-brimmed hats, both carrying lapdogs, to a conference room. Jonathan recognized trusts and estates clients when he saw them, no matter the country.

  On the landing of the palazzo’s staircase stood a statue of a young Hercules cleaning the stables of King Augeas. Jonathan thought back to his first years at Dulling and Pierce, when during months of document review he had to purge every memo from the desktops, laptops, and mobile devices of executive clients who had been indicted for every white-collar crime imaginable. A young hero cleaning the mythical stables. Jonathan, too, had cleaned the shit of the gods.

  On the top floor of the palazzo, Jonathan stood in front of the closed double doors of Tatton’s office. He was about to knock when he noticed his black shoes were caked with a layer of thick gray mud from beneath the Colosseum. He slipped into the bathroom, wiped the shoes clean, and caught his reflection in the mirror. A perfect facsimile of the lawyer he was seven hours ago, now wearing a pressed gray suit, spread white collar, and navy silk tie. The only hint of the last few hours was a cut just below his hairline, and he covered it with a forelock. Jonathan stared at the mirror, and in his exhaustion his mind drifted back to the first time he had met Bruce
Tatton, six years ago. Jonathan’s academic career had recently collapsed and he was working at an auction house, cataloging antiquities that had been sold the evening before.

  “If not for you, our client would have a fake cupid sitting on his mantel,” were the first words Bruce Tatton ever said to him.

  Jonathan recognized the man from the auction the night before. He had sat among the well-dressed dealers and collectors, known to the staff as the “glossy posse.” Jonathan remembered him in the first row, bidding on a marble statue of Cupid while the large flat-screen monitor converted each bid to dollars, euros, yen, Swiss francs.

  From Jonathan’s view backstage he had noticed the statuette’s back hair locks were braided, a style unknown in antiquity. Lot 102, Jonathan knew instantly, was a fake. Jonathan remembered making eye contact with the bidder and mouthing a single word: “No.”

  Perhaps it had been thirty years of reading the faces of jurors and judges that allowed Tatton to react instantaneously. His paddle froze midway past his chest and then lowered into his lap.

  Now, the morning after the auction, the man stood before Jonathan in Sotheby’s storage room, looking out of place in his immaculate suit.

  “The executive offices are upstairs,” Jonathan said, walking over to a building directory on the wall. “This is the storage room. You must be in the wrong place.”

  “Wrong place?” Tatton leaned against a wooden crate. “Top of your class at the City College of New York and fencing finalist at the Division I Nationals in Albany. Rhodes in Latin literature in 1999. Rome Prize in 2001. And here you are, dusting off ancient marbles like a stock boy to make the rent on an illegal sublet above a gyro shop on the Lower East Side.” Tatton glanced around the stockroom. “Not the career trajectory I would have expected.”

  Tucking his clipboard under his arm, Jonathan glared. “You’ll excuse me. I have a noon auction to prepare for.”

  Tatton handed Jonathan his card. “Our law firm represents high-net-worth collectors of antiquities.” Tatton turned around and began walking out, his silhouette framed by the loading bay’s daylight. He looked around the storage room. “It’s not me who’s in the wrong place, Jonathan. It’s you.”

  You use a whole bloody bottle of aftershave, Marcus?” Jonathan’s mind reeled back to the present. Mildren’s head poked through the bathroom doorway, files in both of his arms. “What’s taking you so long? In Tatton’s office. Now.”

  Tatton’s office had the cavernous quality of a gilded ballroom. Its sheer square footage dwarfed even the large French baroque carved-oak desk that could have belonged to Napoleon. A domed Renaissance mural of pink clouds and raining angels exuded a convenient atmosphere of infallibility. Tatton paced on the lavishly restored burled walnut planks and spoke quietly into the phone as if comforting the bereaved.

  Mildren slumped into a green velvet chair and Tatton acknowledged them both, nodding ominously.

  “Cultural Heritage Guard,” Tatton said, his hand over the receiver as he hung up. Mildren sat there silent, pen poised over a writing pad. He knew his master’s habit of adding information in his own time. “A meeting,” Tatton said to Jonathan directly, as though he required special instruction. “It shouldn’t take long.”

  “Cultural Heritage Guard?” Jonathan asked.

  “The Tutela del Patrimonio Culturale,” Mildren responded, writing on his legal pad already jammed with notes. “A carabinieri unit.”

  “The antiquity squad, isn’t it?” Jonathan disguised the strain in his voice.

  “Indeed,” Tatton said. “The comandante himself is on his way here.”

  “To the office?”

  “Usually what ‘here’ means, old boy,” Mildren said. “In the place you’re standing.”

  A flashing red light accompanied the discreet beep from the phone on Tatton’s desk. Outside the window, Jonathan watched the gates open as a police car crawled slowly through like an invading force.

  “Did he mention anything else?” Jonathan knew he was asking too many questions, and hurried with an explanation. “Because I’ve found some research that—”

  “That I’m sure is quite useful, yes.” Tatton cut him off, centering the small clock on his desk to the millimeter. “Your instructions are to say nothing.”

  The carabinieri car parked diagonally across from the firm’s doors. Jonathan watched a bearded man in an overcoat get out of the car. A younger officer stepped out of the car and remained in the piazza. Jonathan recognized his lanky frame and high hairline of matted red curls. The officer was still applying a cold pack to his right elbow. A hollow beat of Jonathan’s heart struck like a pounded fist. It was the man who attacked him just two hours ago beneath the Colosseum.

  In a strange fragmentation of time, Jonathan watched Tatton stand up, nod into his phone, and say, “Mandali su.” Send them up.

  “They gave no reason for coming?” Jonathan managed to ask Mildren, but his voice must have been louder than he thought, because Tatton answered from behind his desk.

  “Of course not,” Tatton said, wiping imaginary dust from his desk. “What did the Greeks say? Surprise is worth a hundred men?”

  Profeta walked through the corridors of the Dulling and Pierce palazzo escorted by the firm’s public relations staffer, a petite Italian man in a charcoal suit and skinny black tie whose natural posture leaned slightly forward, resembling a courteous bow. He smiled nervously, explaining the palazzo’s history and architecture as they walked, curious why the comandante of the carabinieri’s most elite unit demanded to speak with the office’s most senior partner.

  “Built in 1660, the palazzo housed Innocent the Tenth’s family—”

  “His mistress,” Profeta said as they walked.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “This palazzo was built in 1650 by Innocent the Tenth for his reputed mistress, Olimpia Maidalchini.”

  “We don’t normally give that part of the history,” the public relations staffer said. Another nervous smile.

  “Of course not,” Profeta said.

  With the formality of a palace courtier, the public relations officer rapped gently on the oversized double doors of Tatton’s office and then opened them. Profeta waited a few feet behind.

  “Comandante,” Tatton said. “An honor, truly. Now, when was the last time you and I had the pleasure?”

  “The Ara Pacis restoration,” Profeta said.

  “Ah, yes,” Tatton said, politely unclear as to his meaning. “How could I forget?”

  Comandante Profeta had become a vocal critic of heavy corporate fund-raising for local restoration projects. At the Ara Pacis restoration—sponsored mainly by Dulling and Pierce corporate clients—the comandante ’s quip about the postmodern architecture for the altar’s new museum revealed far more than an architectural critique. “The new museum’s iron-and-glass cage pays homage not only to modernism but also its financial sponsors,” La Repubblica had quoted Profeta as saying. “It even looks like a petrol station.”

  Tatton gestured for the comandante to sit in the oversized chair across from him. He gestured to Mildren and Jonathan. “Comandante, my associate, Andrew Mildren, and our visiting colleague from New York, Jonathan Marcus.”

  Jonathan nodded in greeting, squeezing the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger as though massaging a migraine, making only the briefest of eye contact as he shook the comandante’s hand. Jonathan returned to his seat, gazing through the window at Lieutenant Rufio, who still stood beside the carabinieri car. The officer was no longer the despa rate man Jonathan had encountered in the tunnels beneath the Colosseum. He was taller than Jonathan remembered, and his posture bore a disciplined grace.

  Tatton sat down, his head bowing respectfully. “Now, Comandante,” he said, his tone businesslike, “how is it that we may help you?”

  A secretary came in with tiny cups of espresso and placed them between the comandante and Tatton. It became clear to Jonathan that—incredibly—the carabiniere was
not here to arrest him.

  “Late last night we raided an abandoned warehouse in the port of Civitavecchia. It appeared to be a safe house for the trafficking of illicit antiquities. The site contained high-tech equipment and crates of torn manuscript pages.”

  “Intriguing, Comandante.” Tatton’s tone was guarded. “But I’m not certain how we can assist you.”

  Profeta removed a piece of paper from the manila folder under his arm. He pushed it slowly across Tatton’s desk. “Our technology team recovered this image from the hard drives. Forgive the bullet hole in the center. It seems someone wanted to dispose of their research abruptly.”

  From where Jonathan sat he could make out a sketch of the fragments of the Forma Urbis under a plate of shattered glass.

  “Does the image look familiar to you?”

  “You’re in a law firm, not a classics department,” Tatton said. He handed the page back to Profeta. “I’m sorry it doesn’t.”

  “They’re fragments of the Forma Urbis,” Profeta said. “Your client’s fragments of the Forma Urbis,” he added, as though helping him along amiably.

  “Comandante,” Tatton said, leaning back slowly, his head raised, neck outstretched like a noble animal in sense of danger. His tone was still civil, but his indignance now more thinly veiled. “You’re not suggesting—”

  “That your client was somehow involved in the operation we raided last night?” Profeta waited a moment. “Unclear. The operation was not interested in selling antiquities here in Rome.”

  “Not interested in selling?” Mildren said, the thought offending him. “What for, then?”

  “Research,” Profeta said ominously.

  “Or another smuggling operation.” Tatton smiled. “Palimpsests and manuscripts are doing quite well at auction these days.”